Unpaid Internships Can Offer Graduates Entry to Paid Jobs

For many recent college graduates, unpaid internships are the best way to get a foot in the door and land a paying job when a slot eventually opens. But interns should guard against getting stuck in unpaid jobs for too long and make sure they gain experience that will be attractive to other employers.

By DANIEL NASAW
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

http://www.wsj.com

Unpaid work is "something to fall back on if you’ve come up empty in the job search," says Brad Karsh, president of JobBound, a Chicago employment-coaching firm. He recommends resorting to unpaid work only after six months of intensive job hunting, and then reassessing the situation after three months to determine if you are gaining experience and have a chance at a paying job.

If you are keen on working in a particular company or industry and the only work available is unpaid, "you could do worse than taking that job," says Mr. Karsh.

That is the route Julia Powell Grossman followed after graduating from Mount Holyoke College two years ago. The 23-year-old Piedmont, Calif., native tried for four months to find work with international aid and advocacy organizations. But after her networking and letter-writing campaign failed to yield a paid position, she took an unpaid job helping to plan a benefit at the International Crisis Group in New York.

She says she constantly reminded her bosses of her interest in international development and stressed that she wanted to stay with the organization. Last June, she became a paid intern, and in August she landed a permanent job as office manager. "They saw me working these long hours and wanted to make sure that I would stay," she says.

In the wake of the successful benefit she helped plan, the organization decided to ramp up development efforts and this month made her a development officer, assisting the director of development.

Catherine Boult, a college classmate of Ms. Grossman, was offered an hourly wage at the Center for the Study of the Presidency, a Washington think tank, after she had put in about four months as an unpaid intern. More than a year later, she has been promoted to a full-time paid job that involves both fund raising and coordinating a team of research fellows.

The most valuable unpaid jobs offer challenging learning opportunities. After finishing a B.A. in journalism at California State University, Chico, in December, Jillian Harkrader took an unpaid internship at MSR Communications, a small San Francisco public-relations firm. She worked 40 hours a week, learning from her supervisors how to pitch stories to reporters, write news releases and handle clients. Unable to afford an apartment, she lived with her grandparents.

After about a month, a paid position opened up as an account coordinator supporting senior agents and was offered to her. The internship, she says, was "the best way for me to put my foot in the door [in the public-relations industry], even if I didn’t get hired here."

But there is always a risk that you will waste your time getting coffee for supervisors or doing clerical work — and miss opportunities with other employers. For seven months, Julie Fabricant did mostly office work without pay at a New York City children’s television production house. "I don’t think it improved my film skills at all, or [my skills] in that field," says the 25-year-old Brandeis University graduate.

Her supervisors didn’t make an effort to train her, she says, and she eventually took a paying job at magazine publisher Condé Nast Publications Inc. She thinks that the stigma of doing unpaid work hindered her job search. When she applied at Condé Nast, she didn’t mention on her résumé that her TV experience was unpaid, for fear it would hurt her salary negotiations.

Mr. Karsh says that if supervisors assign only menial work, it is up to the interns to find mentors and take on more-challenging tasks to prove themselves. "In college, if you do exactly what you’re told and you do it well, you get an A. But in the real world, if you do exactly what you’re told and you do it well, you’re not going to pass," he says, and "that’s a C."

Write to Daniel Nasaw at [email protected]

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